


The Echo of Memories

by GraphiteWrites



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: CA: TWS, Gen, Headcanon, Howling Commandos - Freeform, Memories, Movie Spoilers, National Mall, Smithsonian, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 13:44:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1552544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraphiteWrites/pseuds/GraphiteWrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My own headcanon as to what happened with Bucky after he left Steve on the shore of the Potomac at the end of TWS. Spoilers for the movie, so watch out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Echo of Memories

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly MCU, hints at comic references.  
> The bit with the little girl at the museum is from this post here: http://buckybarnesisnotavillain.co.vu/post/84305827946  
> This was just too perfect of a situation and I thought it fit really nicely with what I was doing.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to the lovely fandommkopf for being my constant beta. :)

He had left the man there, thick suit made heavier by water, drying out on the smooth pebble of the water's edge. He wasn't quite sure why, but he had felt compelled to pull the other man from the water; his life needed to be saved and that was all he knew for sure. There was a little voice in the back of his head telling him there was something more to this guy, some distant familiarity that wasn't quite clear.

A couple days had passed before he managed to get in front of a computer. He sat down at a small library with a cup of coffee and the bill of his hat tucked low. It had been so long since he'd needed coffee. There was no excess adrenaline running through his system, no directive to keep him going. He had headache after headache and his eyes burned with sleeplessness.

He may have been shoved into cryo on a regular basis, but it wasn't usually for more than a few years; he had no problem keeping up with technology, despite the feeling like maybe he should. His fingers moved quickly over the keyboard, closing his eyes as he tried to pull what snippets of information he could from Hydra intel still floating through his mind.

Fury. SHIELD Director Nicholas Fury had been his target. Then that damned man on the bridge, the one with the shield, the one he left on the rocks because he couldn't kill him. The one that had become his mission. Did he have a name?

“You’re my friend,” the blonde had ground out.

"You're my mission," he had said, desperately trying to convince himself it was just another job; another notch on his belt.

"Then finish it." His opponent had quit fighting back a long time ago; refusing to fight the person this man thought he was. “Because I'm with you till the end of the line." That had made him pause just long enough for them to fall. Those words had felt like an echo to him for a moment.

S... Something with an S...

He searched. Nick Fury + SHIELD.

He followed hot link after hot link, website to website, seeing things about Fury he already knew and things he knew to be lies. He didn’t need any of this. It was a frustrating half hour. His coffee was gone, his taste buds burned numb from drinking it too hot too fast, and the paper cup was crushed in the leather palm of his gloved left hand. Wait…

There he was, the tall blonde. A photo of him in some ridiculous getup dated around WWII. Like he was surprised at that possibility. He kept looking… Captain America. How pretentious. A new search with that name.

The Smithsonian had unveiled a new exhibit dedicated to the American Hero earlier that year. Looks like it was time for a history lesson. Maybe he’d find something useful.

He jogged up the busy steps, head low and hidden under his hat, pushing his long hair behind his ears. He slipped in with a group of teens, zipping up his sweater and shoving his left hand into the pocket; the fingers of his right twitched at his side. He followed annoyingly red-white-and-blue signs until he was greeted by a theatrically lit hall. He moved past the giant mural of the hero’s face with a suppressed eye-roll. Americans like their icons; too bad this country is nothing like what this exhibit painted this man to be.

He ignored the suited mannequins, turning his back in favor of the informational panels. Audio repeated printed words: he was a scrawny fuck with a weak heart before the Army got ahold of him. They pumped him full of super-juice and he was finally able to enforce those good ol’ boy ideals of his; imagine that. Steven Rogers. Keep reading, keep reading.

He stopped. His breathing stopped. His heart stopped.

A video played on loop below a biographical display. There were two men in that video: Steven Rogers and a very familiar face grinning like an idiot. He distantly heard the audio playing, “Best friends since birth, James Buchanan Barnes and Steve Rogers were inseparable on both the schoolyard and the battlefield. Barnes: the only Howling Commando to give his life in service of his country.”

He had to stop his jaw from hitting the floor. On the display board, next to the words being spoken was a large photo of “Bucky” Barnes. Of him. 

He clenched his teeth hard as he felt a headache coming on.  
Not here. Not now. His mind had started to unravel at the smallest things, recently. Zola’s voice echoed through his mind, “Seargent Barnes…” He had back last week. The man on the bridge—Captain Steven Rogers—he knew him. It hurt to know him, but he did.

His right hand clenched into a fist so tight, he felt his fingers bite into his palm through his glove as the pain ripped through his head. It felt the way it did every time they wiped his mind. He tasted the metallic tang of blood as he bit his tongue. The urge to reach out and touch that digital portrait of him was extreme; almost stronger than the pain.

“Bucky,” he whispered to himself, remembering the name Rogers had called him.

He closed his eyes and took a deep, leveling breath that he let out slowly through his nose as the pain reached its peak. This is when things came to him: choppy, out of order, nonsense. The rush of feelings was nearly overwhelming to him and he heard his left arm start to wheeze with the stress of his racing mind. Flowers, a casket, two headstones where there had been only one. The sound of fleshy sparring, ballerina shoes, red hair and creamy skin.

He needed to leave here.

As he walked down the streets, he managed to lift a wallet here and there. No one carried cash these days, plastic everywhere. At least no one was looking for him.

He wanted to be in New York, wanted to walk through Brooklyn. Brooklyn felt right, like that was where he—where Bucky—was from. There was a cheesy motel tucked out of the way a short bus ride to the National Mall. He hadn’t lifted enough cash to pay for a week at this place. The clerk in the office took the credit card sans ID as soon as she took one look in the Soldier’s eyes.

“Have the corner room. Privacy. Ice machine at the end of the hall under the stairs,” she said quietly, handing Marie Cuevas’s card back to him with a room key. There was blood under his fingernails, at the very corner of his lips.

He looked at her nervously, and then walked out the door, making his quick way to Room 27 at the far corner.

“Don’t make me do this.” Rogers’ voice bounced through his head as he struggled to get the key in the door, the plastic room marker rattling annoyingly.

He growled and steadied his hand, forcing himself to concentrate long enough to open the goddamn door. Finally. He could shut out everything around him.

It was dark and he liked that. Suddenly, he was suffocating and hot as an aftershock of pain ran through his skull. He took of his hat, throwing it across the room and clutching at his temples for a second. Then he managed to get his sweater off, next clawing at his shirt as the sweat ran down his back.

“You know me,” he had insisted.

“NO I DON’T!” he screamed at the room. His metal arm whined as he drew back and threw his fist through the wall above the television.

“Bucky.” That name again. “You’ve known me your whole life. Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

“SHUUUUT UUUUUUP!” he yelled. His throat started to hurt.

“I’m not going to fight you. You’re my friend.”

Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit. His fist hit the wall to mirror his memory and the pain began to subside.

Before he knew it, he was making his way over to the lumpy arm chairs flanking an old card table with a matchbook shoved under one leg. He took the cushions off of them without thinking. He added the four flat pillows from the bed, piling them all at the foot of the mattress.

He wasn’t quite sure why, but he knew it would help to lie in the midst of all this cloth and pretend it was soft. He sat back in the middle of the cushions, his head back against the bed and his wrists hanging over his knees. A booted foot reached out and toed on the power button to the television: a special on the History Chanel about the Howling Commandos.

James Buchanan Barnes. “Yakob,” he vaguely heard from somewhere in his mind whispered from pouting lips in husky Russian.

“Bucky.” Saying it out loud made it a definitive part of him.

He listened to the narrator as he forced himself to relax and relearned all he felt he knew about Dum Dum Dugan, Gabe Jones, Montgomery Falsworth and the rest of his Commandos.

Maybe if he quit fighting, it wouldn’t hurt so badly.

He woke up before he realized he’d fallen asleep. Something about Ancient Aliens drawled on the TV and he groaned. Running his right hand over his face, he kicked out his foot to turn it off. There was a vague understanding of him going through strangely normal motions: making coffee, taking a shower, getting dressed. He glanced at the wall above the TV as he pocketed the hotel key.

Whoops.

The deal was he needed to go back to the Smithsonian. He needed to go through the entire exhibit and see what he could learn about himself, if nothing else. He now knew there was a large chunk of himself tied to Rogers and he needed this to fill in gaps in his memories. These gaps were big enough to drive trucks through, so it would take some time.

He navigated the bus system with a borrowed pass and went back to the museum. He slipped back through easy enough, never catching the eyes of the old white-haired guard. After a couple hours, he peeled himself away and piled back on the bus to his room.

The housekeeper had come through and put all the pillows and cushions back, dusted up the drywall he had scattered. He gathered all the cushions and pillows back on the floor at the foot of the bed and went through the TV’s pay-per-view options. Ms. Cuevas was going to buy him some of his own history. He fell asleep again to more specials revolving around the war, the Commandos, and Captain America. He only woke up three times that night with blistering pain running through his head.

This went on for days. Wake up, shower, museum, library, museum, motel, sleep. He tried sleeping on the bed once and couldn’t get twenty straight minutes.

The last trip to the museum, after two weeks straight of reading and memorizing every word, something changed him. There was a little girl with dark black hair who recognized him. She knew Bucky Barnes, and she couldn’t have been happier to meet him. She promised to keep his secret and placed a bright blue hair tie in his leather coated, metal palm. All his nervousness slipped away then and he felt a wall of emotion hit him. His lips turned up, for the first time since he could remember (and that was a big problem to begin with), in the barest hint of a smile. That little girl had turned and skipped back to her mother and siblings.

He hadn’t bothered to leave until near dusk that day. He decided to walk through National Mall a bit, pulling his hair into a little bun with that blue hair tie through the hole in the back of his hat. He zipped his jacket against the breeze and started walking. He’d been doing a bit of recon here and there as things came back to him. There were snippets trying to sort themselves out in some kind of order: a pretty brunette with big brown eyes he might have taken to a carnival once and a scrawny kid in an alley brandishing a trash can lid.

He made his way toward the Reflection Pool and sat on the steps near the Grant Memorial. He waited, waited… There.

Two figures, both running, one much faster than the other.

He heard one—Sam Wilson, he’d found out—yell as it echoed off the concrete and trees, “YES! LEFT! I KNOW!”

James almost wanted to chuckle. He felt like maybe Steve was the one yelling at him playfully for things like that at one point. He just wanted to know they were alive, that they were still okay. He wasn’t a happy person; he was remembering the gallons of blood staining his hands more and more each day. He was just consciously aware of the fact that he could feel again, even if that did come with nightmares of Hydra hunting him down and taking it all away.

He stood slowly, stretching his aching joints. He stole a last glance at the pair and his eyes met with Sam’s. Panic coursed through him and he froze like a deer in headlights. He didn’t know whether to be threatened or scared and both emotions ran over his face.

Sam’s arm shot out quickly, stopping Steve hard in the chest mid lap with a flat palm. Something was said because Steve’s attention was drawn in James’s direction.

Shit. Oh, well. He pulled his left hand out of his pocket to adjust his hat more squarely on his head and the metal fingers poking from his glove caught a little of the remaining sunlight. As he turned away, he caught their jaws hanging open from the corner of his eye. Here was the bus, perfect timing. He got on and was motoring his way back to his little nest of cushion on the floor, just like when they were kids.


End file.
